Tripwire

“Exactly,” DeWitt said. “Not courageous, because a courageous guy is somebody who feels the fear but conquers it. Vic never felt it in the first place. It made him a better war flyer than me. I was the one passed out of Rucker head of the class, and I’ve got the plaque to prove it, but when we got in-country, he was better than me, no doubt about it.”

“In what kind of a way?”

DeWitt shrugged, like he couldn’t explain it. “We learned everything as we went along, just made it all up. Fact is, our training was shit. It was like being shown a little round thing and being told ‘this is a baseball,’ and then getting sent straight out to play in the major leagues. That’s something I’m trying to put right now that I’m here ru

“Hobie was good at learning on the job?” Reacher asked.

“The best,” DeWitt said. “You know anything about helicopters in the jungle?”

Reacher shook his head. “Not a lot.”

“First main problem is the LZ,” DeWitt said. “LZ, landing zone, right? You got a desperate bunch of tired infantry under fire somewhere, they need exfiltrating, they get on the radio and our dispatcher tells them sure, make us an LZ and we’ll be right over to pull you out. So they use explosives and saws and whatever the hell else they got and they blast a temporary LZ in the jungle. Now a Huey with the rotor turning needs a space exactly forty-eight feet wide and fifty-seven feet nine-point-seven inches long to land in. But the infantry is tired and in a big hurry and Charlie is raining mortars down on them and generally they don’t make the LZ big enough. So we can’t get them out. This happened to us two or three times, and we’re sick about it, and one night I see Vic studying the leading edge of the rotor blade on his Huey. So I say to him, ‘What are you looking at?’ And he says, ‘These are metal.’ I’m thinking, like what else would they be? Bamboo? But he’s looking at them. Next day, we’re called to a temporary LZ again, and sure enough the damn thing is too small, by a couple of feet all around. So I can’t get in. But Vic goes down anyway. He spins the chopper around and around and cuts his way in with the rotor. Like a gigantic flying lawn mower? It was awesome. Bits of tree flying everywhere. He pulls out seven or eight guys and the rest of us go down after him and get all the rest. That became SOP afterward, and he invented it, because he was cold and logical and he wasn’t afraid to try. That maneuver saved hundreds of guys over the years. Literally hundreds, maybe even thousands.”

“Impressive,” Reacher said.

“You bet your ass impressive,” DeWitt said back. “Second big problem we had was weight. Suppose you were out in the open somewhere, like a field. The infantry would come swarming in on you until the damn chopper was too heavy to take off. So your own gu

“You admired him,” Jodie said.

DeWitt nodded. “Yes, I did. And I’m not afraid to admit it.”

“But you weren’t close.”

He shook his head. “Like my daddy told me, don’t make friends with the other pilots. And I’m glad I didn’t. Too many of them died.”

“How did he spend his time?” Reacher asked. “The files show a lot of days you couldn’t fly.”

“Weather was a bitch. A real bitch. You got no idea. I want this facility moved someplace else, maybe Washington State, where they get some mists and fogs. No point training down in Texas and Alabama if you want to go fighting someplace you get weather.”

“So how did you spend the downtime?”

“Me? I did all kinds of things. Sometimes I partied, sometimes I slept. Sometimes I took a truck out and went scavenging for things we needed.”

“What about Vic?” Jodie asked. “What did he do?”

DeWitt just shrugged again. “I have no idea. He was always busy, always up to something, but I don’t know what it was. Like I told you, I didn’t want to mix with the other flyers.”

“Was he different on the second tour?” Reacher asked.

DeWitt smiled briefly. “Everybody was different second time around.”

“In what way?” Jodie asked.

“Angrier,” DeWitt said. “Even if you signed up again right away it was nine months minimum before you got back, sometimes a whole year. Then you got back and you figured the place had gone to shit while you were away. You figured it had gotten sloppy and half-assed. Facilities you’d built would be all falling down, trenches you’d dug against the mortars would be half full of water, trees you’d cleared away from the helicopter parking would be all sprouting up again. You’d feel your little domain had been ruined by a bunch of know-nothing idiots while you were gone. It made you angry and depressed. And generally speaking it was true. The whole ’Nam thing went steadily downhill, right out of control. The quality of the perso

“So you’d say Hobie got disillusioned?” Reacher asked.

DeWitt shrugged. “I really don’t remember much about his attitude. Maybe he coped OK. He had a strong sense of duty, as I recall.”

“What was his final mission about?”

The gray eyes suddenly went blank, like the shutters had just come down.

“I can’t remember.”

“He was shot down,” Reacher said. “Shot out of the air, right alongside you. You can’t recall what the mission was?”

“We lost eight thousand helicopters in ‘Nam,” DeWitt said. “Eight thousand, Mr. Reacher, begi

“What was it about?” Reacher asked again.

“Why do you want to know?” DeWitt asked back.

“It would help me.”

“With what?”

Reacher shrugged. “With his folks, I guess. I want to be able to tell them he died doing something useful.”

DeWitt smiled. A bitter, sardonic smile, worn and softened at the edges by thirty years of regular use. “Well, my friend, you sure as hell can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because none of our missions were useful. They were all a waste of time. A waste of lives. We lost the war, didn’t we?”

“Was it a secret mission?”

There was a pause. Silence in the big office.

“Why should it be secret?” DeWitt asked back, neutrally.

“He only took on board three passengers. Seems like a special sort of a deal to me. No ru

“I don’t remember,” DeWitt said again.

Reacher just looked at him, quietly. DeWitt stared back.

“How should I remember? I hear about something for the first time in thirty years and I’m supposed to remember every damn detail about it?”

“This isn’t the first time in thirty years. You were asked all about it a couple of months ago. In April of this year.”

DeWitt was silent.

“General Garber called the NPRC about Hobie,” Reacher said. “It’s inconceivable he didn’t call you afterward. Won’t you tell us what you told him?”

DeWitt smiled. “I told him I didn’t remember.”

There was silence again. Distant rotor blades, coming closer.

“On behalf of his folks, won’t you tell us?” Jodie asked softly. “They’re still grieving for him. They need to know about it.”

DeWitt shook his head. “I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?” Reacher asked.